Why Communicate Visually?

This is a lesson from our new eCourse called Communicating Visually, which was authored by yours truly.

If you were to ask every manager on Earth to list their five least favorite managerial activities, all of them would include "putting out fires" on their list. We all know what it's like to have to put out a fire – a fire starts when somebody screws up and suddenly your project is in jeopardy. You, being the person in charge, inevitably have to swoop in and put the fire out, and putting it out requires a lot of last minute scrambling, long nights, weekends in the office, and plenty of stress.

Fires occur because of poor communication. Perhaps someone doesn't understand why what they're doing is important or who is actually responsible for what. But somewhere along the way some part of a major project or assignment falls apart and you, the manager, are the lucky one who gets to put it back together. It gets worse: bad communication is endemic, so you're going to be putting out lots of fires. You move from crisis to crisis, fixing care of one urgent, mission-critical screw-up after another. You're stressed, you have too much to do, you can't go home early, it becomes harder to schedule vacations, and on and on.

But wait a minute – we identified the disease responsible for creating crises: bad communication. Rather than treat the symptoms of bad communication, the fires, why don't you start treating the disease of bad communication? How can you communicate in a manner that makes your specifications absolutely clear and easy for your co-workers to remember?

A Better Way to Communicate

How can we communicate both clearly and memorably? Do we simply repeat ourselves more? Communicate slower? No.

Instead, we should communicate visually. We've all heard the expression "a picture is worth a thousand words," and it's true – what takes one thousand words to explain correctly can be described much more easily using a simple picture.

Not only is it easier to communicate something using a picture, but it's also much easier for people to remember things that have been communicated to them visually. Psychologist Jerome Bruner of New York University has studied the art of communication, and his studies have shown that:

• People remember 10% of what they hear;
• 20% of what they read; and
• 80% of what they see and do.

Most people are visual learners; a recent study by the U.S. Federal Government suggested that up to 83% of human learning occurs visually. The study also indicated that information which is communicated visually is retained up to six times greater than information which is communicated by spoken word alone.

Manager's problems can't resolve their miscommunication problems with their teams by merely speaking more or writing more – you can't scale failure into success. Instead, we should augment what we've been trying to say with pictures. It's that simple.

Consider an example: you're trying to tell your webmaster that you want to make a slight modification to your layout – which of these two communication mediums is less likely to be misinterpreted:

Writing

Dear Webmaster,
I'd like you to make a slight change to SmartDraw.com's homepage:
Please make the font underneath the big image on top of the page a little larger than it is currently. You know the text that I'm talking about? The text to the left of the "play video" image? That text. It needs to be made a bit bigger so it's easier to read.
And I don't mean ALL of the text to the left of the "play video image" – just the sub-header. You know that text which is in bold just above all of the other text? That text.

The text in the rest of the paragraph. Just the bold text in the sub-header. It needs to be bigger; maybe 14pt or so.
Please let me know if you need further clarification.

Thanks,
Manager

Visual

Dear Webmaster,
Please modify SmartDraw.com's homepage. See below:

Thanks,
Manager

Which version is clearer? The visual version is indisputably clearer. I have a word bubble which points directly at the sub-header I want modified and I even drew a box around the darn thing for good measure. There is zero ambiguity about what I want. As for the written version – who the hell knows what the webmaster would change?

This is just one example of something that can be communicated visually – in fact, anything can be communicated visually.

What Can Be Communicated Visually

Let's say that you're managing a project for your company; like any project, you have to come up with a project plan before your team can begin work. Most folks simply use their project plans to provide answers to the six classic questions:

• Who?
• What?
• When?
• Where?
• Why?
• How?

However, in project manager speech, these six questions usually look something more like this:

• Who is responsible for this?
• What needs to be done?
• When will this be done?
• Where will we focus our efforts?
• Why is this important?
• How are we going to do this?

So, how can you be sure that your answers are clear and easy to remember? By communicating visually. For instance, if the project you were managing were a construction project, you might answer these questions using the following graphics:

None of these graphics are particularly difficult to produce, especially if you use an intuitive tool like our product, SmartDraw. These types of graphics are called "business graphics" because they are simple and easy enough for the average businessperson to use; you don't need to be an artist to be able to produce clear business graphics which communicate your plans clearly and memorably.

In the following lessons of this eCourse, we will show you how to come up with your own answers to these six questions (Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?) using the appropriate kinds of business graphics, and we will explain how these business graphics will help you resolve frustrating communication issues by adding clarity and improved data retention to the picture, no pun intended.

If you liked this post, make sure you sign up for Communicating Visually.

Also, I'd like to thank Chuck Frey from the Mind Mapping Software Blog for sydnicating this same lesson on his excellent blog. The more people out there who begin communicating visually, the more efficient we all become.